Over 60 Universities in China to Utilize UnCover Customized Gateway and UnCover Reveal

@Carl: The CARL Corporation Newsletter
[1999]

Copyright (c) 1999 Carl Corporation

UnCover is pleased to announce implementation of an UnCover Customized Gateway and Reveal site license for CALIS (China Academic Library and Information System), a major resource sharing network of universities and colleges in mainland China.

Initially, 61 institutions from across China, including Peking University, Beijing Medical University, and Tsinghua University, will utilize the Customized Gateway and Reveal site license. The license will eventually extend participation to the rest of CALIS, which encompasses over 1000 academic libraries.

Addressing the need for comprehensive journal information

Both services were selected by CALIS to provide more timely, diverse access to journal information, especially foreign serial publications. The Customized Gateway is being set up to enhance and broaden the range of local periodical access by providing a user-friendly, online system for patrons to place unmediated orders for articles not owned by any of the CALIS libraries. The Reveal site license is providing an automated current awareness service for students, faculty, and researchers of CALIS libraries to stay up-to-date on the latest journal literature.

“We are honored that CALIS selected UnCover and we're excited to meet the challenge. The demand for journal information in the higher education system of mainland China is immense when you consider there are over 2.2 million undergraduate and graduate students and nearly 400,000 professors and faculty. Both Customized Gateways and Reveal are powerful, yet low-maintenance services that are designed to be effective in a single site environment or a large consortial, networked setting like CALIS. We look forward to participating and partnering with CALIS in their efforts to extend constituency-wide access to online information resources,” said Patricia Culkin, CARL President.

Customized Gateway set up for CALIS

With the Customized Gateway, CALIS is matching its union catalog with the UnCover database–which indexes nearly 18,000 journal titles and over 8 million article citations–to create a unique resource that offers article level access to CALIS library holdings as well as items available in UnCover. A dedicated web site enables patrons to independently search the database for articles 24 hours a day, with no contention from users outside of CALIS. If an article of interest is located and is not held in any of the CALIS libraries, then the user can place a library-subsidized online order from UnCover, demonstrating the expansion of journal resources that the library is able to offer. However, if any of the CALIS institutions have the title, an automatic block prevents the patron from ordering the article on library funds. Holdings information is displayed online and if the item is not available in the user's home library, the request can be forwarded to another CALIS library thereby facilitating resource sharing.

Reveal site license set up for CALIS

UnCover Reveal is an e-mail alerting service which informs users of new articles published in selected journals or on selected topics. The Reveal site license allows CALIS patrons to log on to a dedicated web site to sign up for the push technology service and individually tailor it to their research needs.